Saturday, February 21, 2009

MPW Goes Partisan: Ben Kramer, Doug Duncan Slammed

Reposted in part from a comment left at Just Up the Pike ("does polling place consolidation hurt minority voters?", Reed, Dan, Feb 21, 2009):


Dan, if you bother to read any of the other recent entries, a clear pattern emerges.

MPW, which was formerly very partisanly Democrat in general and "progressive" in leanings -- whatever that may mean, a different thing to all different people -- is now very solidly in the Navarro camp, and is coming out of the closet as a front for the interests of the County Council as seated.

First, I get kicked off, which generally is the second clear indicator that an operation is a propaganda organ rather than honest reporting and critique. The first clear indicator is that all responses must pass the censor, and censorship of any form other than deleting SPAM or rank obscenity is anathematic to any claims to journalistic integrity.

Then the exact same person who demanded my ouster under the theory "if you can't say something good about someone, don't say anything at all", offers the following:

From Lefty:


[ ... ]
Moreover, it's not like he can rely on his record, or the support of his fellow delegates and senators. His performance in office has been abysmal. He has undercut county unity on countless occasions, most significantly during the special session, but also at other times. My sense is that there is barely repressed rage among the delegation, not only at his positions, which are best described as Republican, but even more so at his antics and the manner in which he goes about things, which is public and vitriolic.

If you see any incumbent delegates and senators supporting Ben Kramer, I suspect that it will be based on their desire to get rid of him in Annapolis, and not on any sincere belief that Kramer is actually the best candidate for the job.

As if that's not enough, I can't get a word in edgewise about anything because of my supposedly hateful race-baiting (WTF?) but the infamous "foolio" gets away with this:

recall reading in the Post sometime recently, an article about Ben Kramer ticking off the whole Black Caucus over his insensitivity to their concerns about racial impact/profiling in his "tough on crime" drive. This makes sense given your comments about his relationship with the rest of the delegation.

[Dood, you pretty much said that Ben Kramer is a heartless racist who's into abusing police power.]


Even Kevin Gillogly notices and takes offense at the coverage:


[ ... ]

More importantly the tone of this blog post and several others you come across as if you have already selected your candidate and if so then you should declare it. That is something you and I have always advocated for MPW -- to let people know who you are for.

I have not decided on a candidate for this race. I will let you know if and when I do. But this is now fourth post that you have tilted towards one candidate. Declare your support or start to write a more balanced post.


Adam Pagnucco defends himself:


[ ... ]

Last time, my union contributed to Navarro, a fact that I repeatedly disclosed. I have never contributed to her. I am not a member of her Facebook group, don't make campaign decisions for her and don't live in her district. I generally favor pro-union candidates, but that's not news to anyone who reads this blog.

I've never pretended to be completely objective. I throw out a combination of fact and opinion and regularly disclose my employment (with the Carpenters Union) and my political affiliations (with the District 18 Democratic Team). The readers know where I'm coming from. If they want to say, "He's a union guy, so we'll take his opinions with a grain of salt on union-backed candidates," so be it.



So, the focus on Navarro -- who isn't even someone that Adam can vote for, if I'm rightly reading his posting -- can't come out of Adam's own concerns or alignment with someone for whom he intends to vote.

From where, then, arises this sudden support of one candidate over all of the others, even if that support mostly consists of complaining about how the mean old Board of Elections seems to be gerrymandering under seeming guise of saving the taxpayer expenses on a Special Election that is likely to have the lowest voter turnout on record? Can we reasonably presume that he just a deeply would have opposed the gerrymandering that was openly and vociferously stated to be intended to make sure that Connie Morella could never again be elected? After all, as an Italian-American she couldn't possibly be more Latina, now could she. So I guess we can take any imputations of ethnic favoritism off of the table of discussion, and if it's not unreasonable partisanism (if it's good for Connie Morella, it's good for Nancy Navarro, eh?) and it's not based on ethnic solidarity politics, it's got to be based on something else. And watching someone who used to be widely respected for integrity suddenly do a blatant about-face and descend into harboring clear factionalists, there's got to be something behind that. And what's behind that stinks of "house organ" and "astroturfing".

Posted by Thomas Hardman at 8:35 AM
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2 comments:

Sleepless in Slumburbia said...

While we’re talking about the leftist partisanship of MPW and re-posting MPW comments, here’s my response to the “Hate Email Circulates in Annapolis” comments thread.

I am primarily responding to foolio’s spastic attack on Leggett for straying from the far left on the measure initiating referrals to ICE for violent offenders.

The title could be “¿‘Foolio’ y MPW, dónde está su sentido común?”:

“Wow, ‘foolio.’ Many of the same people who want commonsense ICE detainer queries for criminals also want stricter law enforcement measures across the board that would affect every Maryland resident. How about harsher charges / penalties for recurring instances of DUI/DWI, for instance?
(Dels. Herman Taylor, Jr. and Kumar Barve may not be too keen on these measures, mind you.)

Apparently some leftist Maryland elites think that having widows burned alive in their own homes and children slain on public buses is a small price to pay for their fanatical political dogma. No, let’s ignore common sense and centrist policy initiatives until we have another reactionary push from the right.

I love how so many leftist Democrats in Montgomery deny or downplay the fact that there are large numbers of Americans who are poor, unskilled, low-skilled, under-skilled, unemployed, underemployed, and the like. I wonder if people exhibiting this kind of naïvete have ever been significantly unemployed or underemployed. Let me tell you that it is a seat-of-the-pants education in race-to-the-bottom labor economics.

Many of these same self-righteous leftists continually scream ‘Racist! Racist!’ They inject race and ethnicity into arguments because it is their trump card. They tar and feather you as a ‘racist’ because you dare to point out how irresponsible it was to tolerate mass illegal immigration while poor and lower middle-class Americans were pushed out of many industries they could formerly count on for living wages.

I am also loving this apparent pissing contest as far as who a ‘Real Progressive’ is. I think we can tell that the sanctioned answer will likely be, ‘Why, the “progressive” who rocks the boat the least!’

How about another question:
Who are the real liberals?

The ones who are more willing to get Hurricane Mitch refugees gainfully employed, or the ones who think Hurricane Katrina victims have a more legitimate claim to things like job counseling and placement?

I chose the latter, and I was exiled from the left.

There will be plenty of economics-challenged liberals who scream, ‘Why, both should/can be accommodated, of course!’
These people need to wake up to the fact that we now have a labor market swollen with hordes of unemployed/underemployed people who represent the lower end of the skills/education spectrum.

Liberal America has let poverty and misery fester in places like the Lower Ninth Ward for generations. But much of the nouveau left apparently would rather move on to fresher and more exciting Global Poverty projects, like abating and/or eliminating poverty in the entirety of Central America. Perhaps they see American-born poor people as difficult to deal with, ungrateful, or even deserving of their circumstances. Those are certainly the kinds of views that emerge from many far leftists once you press them on these matters.

I encourage others to leave the hotbed of hypocrisy and shrill rhetoric occupied by Maryland liberals. The fog of dogma dulls your powers of reason over time.

Fact: The only way I could stay a Maryland liberal was by taking massive quantities of numbing psychiatric medications that turned me into a compliant drone.”

Apologies for the length of the post here, Hardman; on the plus side, all the additional keyword tokens indexed by crawlers/bots boost traffic to your site, no?

February 22, 2009 6:15 AM
Thomas Hardman said...

Sleepless in SLumburbia wrote, in-part:


[ ... ]

I encourage others to leave the hotbed of hypocrisy and shrill rhetoric occupied by Maryland liberals. The fog of dogma dulls your powers of reason over time.

Fact: The only way I could stay a Maryland liberal was by taking massive quantities of numbing psychiatric medications that turned me into a compliant drone.

You know, at the risk of utterly alienating the community of people who both want and need to take medications to help them get through the travesty we call "the modern world", I might add that if you have enough people driving others to the brink of madness through mismanagement and ineptitude, then you will likely have a very large and ready pool of people who are too drugged up to vote rationally, to oust the people who are driving them to dose.

First I must digress a bit, but it's essential to the point I wish to make about MoCo politics:

My own feelings about medication in general can be summed up by me pointing out that about this time last year, I was hit by a car downtown, and broke my hand. It hurt like hell, but it was my good hand and I wanted it to heal correctly, so the most medication I took for it was aspirin.

"Let your pain be your guide," said my orthopedist, and my hand still hurts a little now and then, but because I never stopped feeling "nature's way of telling you that something's wrong", I never over-exerted myself. Now I can play guitar again, I can type almost as well as ever, etc.

Now, if I had broken a leg and had bones sticking out of my skin from a compound fracture, I'd say "morphine, please" and I'd probably say it until I could manage the pain with aspirin. Why? Because I wouldn't want to end up like the unfortunately large number of people who break a bone one day and years later they're eating Oxycontin like Rush Limbaugh and go deaf as a post like he did.

The thing is, a lot of folks take excessive painkillers and on the one hand, they don't have their pain telling them to take it easy, and they re-injure themselves or exascerbate their injury.

On the other hand, as long as they have that unhealed injury, they have a license to get high on some of the strongest drugs known to medical science.

How does this relate to MoCo politics?

Well, I have also known people in therapy for mental disorders who probably needed massive doses of "reality check" medications in the same way I'd need morphine if I had a compound fracture. Some problems clearly call for intervention, for strong medicine. But there's no good excuse to take so much medicine for so long a time that you are unable to feel that you are only hurting yourself worse.

In the same way that it's not beneficial to become a hardcore addict while keeping yourself so doped up that you can't tell you're hurting yourself, there's not much point in keeping yourself crazy so that you can take icky meds that have nasty side-effects. It's even worse if you keep yourself crazy because you've somehow got the idea that it's good to be on meds, when actually the best thing to do is to not make yourself crazy. It's even more important to not let other people make you crazy.

And so it is with MoCo politics:

MoCo politics is like, well, it's like the sort of rationalization and self-delusion that you see from women who treat their depression over their abusive partners and take medication rather than leaving their partners.

My advice about that situation is seen here at this excellent video. Taking dope so that you can face the fact that you love someone who beats you, that's madness, alright. And the medication will treat the madness, right? Wrong! The insanity here, in part, is taking drugs so that you don't feel bad over something that should cause you anguish.

People go to their doctors and say "doctor, it hurts when I do this", and doctors say "well, don't do that, then". It's the basis of medicine that when patients appear and tell you that it hurts to do something stupid, you tell them to stop doing stupid stuff.

Voting for a lot of politicians around here constitutes doing stupid stuff. And if you keep doing stupid stuff and you keep getting the same results and it hurts -- like going back to the husband that beats you and expecting to not have it happen again -- you're taking meds not because you need meds, you're doing stupid stuff because you like to get high.

Thus, we have demonstrated that MoCo voters are all on dope and like it that way, because otherwise they wouldn't keep voting for people that make them crazy.

February 22, 2009 7:07 AM

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